FEATURE: It’s Vive la France for Rishton pair

FORMER animal feed supplier Simon Swinn doesn’t have any campsite experience, apart from camping holidays with the family.

MORE TOP STORIES:

But that hasn’t stopped him from buying his very own campsite in France.

I’m tempted to ask if he’s gone stark raving bonkers. But Simon, 56, has done the research and is convinced he and wife Lorraine, who works for Blackburn with Darwen Council, can make a go of it.

His Kindle book, A Tent in France, is already spreading the word. “I’m selling five or six copies a day, so I should be as rich as Stephen King by the time I’m 300,” he laughs.

Simon had to give up his business following a back injury. The driving was killing him, so he retired. The couple, who have four grown-up children, planned to move to France where they have a house near Limoges (it’s a beautiful four-bed detached with half an acre of land – a snip at £100,000 if anyone’s interested).

“The youngest daughter had started university. We are in our mid 50s, but we don’t have enough money to keep us going for the rest of our lives,” says the entrepreneur. “We love France and wanted to move there, but you can’t just get a job.

“We don’t speak the language very well and we weren’t keen on the idea of a B&B because we didn’t want to have to share our house with people. We’d always had campsite hols as a family because with four kids the cost of a package holiday to Benidorm was around £4,000.

“So our first French camping holiday was to Brittany. We had such a relaxing time that we fell in love with the place, travelled a bit further down to where the sunflowers were, and eventually bought a house there. The campsite is the way forward.”

France offers some varied attractions to both locals and visitors and Simon and Lorraine feel right at home

France is the world’s number one country for campsites – there are 10,000 registered – since the French tend to holiday at home rather than abroad.

Camping Champ de Chapelle lies within the largest oak forest in Europe – La Foret du Troncais – in the picturesque Auvergne region of central France. It has a pool, terrace bar and all the amenities and is a short distance from the popular village of Saint Bonnet. The stunning Lake Etang de Saint Bonnet is two miles away. There’s also a beach.

The site was for sale for 400,000 euros – although Simon used his negotiating skills to bargain. The Dutch couple who owned the site, agreed to stay on and run it. He signed the papers on December 8 in Paris. But it wasn’t a simple process thanks to French bureaucracy.

“One document was 20 pages long and I had to sign four copies of every page. After 30 signatures, it didn’t even look like my signature. We probably have around 200 pages of French documents and translations of every one. It’s kept me very busy over the last few months.

“You can’t get a mortgage on campsites. We sold our house in Rishton and our house in France is also up for sale. We’ll be living in a mobile home on the site over the summer.

“But it’s an immaculate site. The couple who owned it spent so much time looking after it that they didn’t have time to promote it and turnover was dropping year on year. It’s situated in the vast forest that makes oak barrels for certain wines. It was originally planted under Napoleon’s orders to provide wood for sailing ships but by the time the trees had matured steam ships had taken over so they let them grow for another 100 years and now they make them into the barrels.”

Simon and Lorraine love the pace of life in France and the French and English people they’ve met.

“It would take half an hour to drive two miles from Rishton to Blackburn sometimes, but the same distance in France takes about seven minutes because there’s so little traffic no matter what time of day. There are no pot holes and the wine’s still cheap too.

“There’s a great sense of community there too. There are always things going on, like sports days with sack and three-legged races and everyone gets involved and has fun. We had a crazy croquet competition in our garden and guests’ dogs kept running off with the balls. It’s really just something to do while you’re slurping wine.

“It’s all so laid-back. The French also have a two-hour lunch break every day. If you want to get served quickly in a supermarket then turn up ten minutes before lunchtime that way you get three people putting your stuff through the checkout. They have a 35-hour working week and no-one works over that. It’s a wonderful way of life.”

Simon used the ‘lunchhour card’ to his advantage when he wanted to open a bank account at a local branch of Credit Agricole.

“It’s a big task opening a bank account. You need marriage certificates, bank statements, birth certificates, passports, lots of documentation. We started the process and they told me to come back in three weeks to sign the papers. I wasn’t about to go back to England and return just to sign papers, so I said I wanted to sign them there and then.

“They refused so I said I was going to sit there until I signed. The lady said I couldn’t and that she would call the police. And I said, ‘Yes, and you’ll miss your lunch hour’. I signed those papers that day.”

But despite the bureaucracy, Simon and Lorraine are clearly passionate about the French way of life.

“A local farmer offered his tractor for a wedding. It was such a great spectacle with the tractor driving down the main road and the bride and bridesmaids and straw bales in the back. Everyone was honking their horns and waving and the police going past joined in the fun. If you were in Britain you’d get pulled over.

“It’s a much more carefree way of life. When our friends there go back to England they say ‘I’ve got to go back to Blighty next week. I’m dreading it’. In the UK you feel like a hamster on a wheel and you’re not getting anywhere. Jobs shouldn’t rule our lives.”

As the French say ‘la vie est bonne’ – and who could disagree?